It's not that bad... yet
May. 27th, 2010 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe largest oil spill in the Gulf's history happened in 1979. Ixtoc-1, the largest accidental oil spill in history, dropped 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Between 10,000 and 30,000 barrels spewed every day from the well, which took 10 months to cap.
The Deepwater Horizon incident has lasted 38 days, and the best estimates are between 17,000 and 23,000 barrels of oil (with about 3x that volume in natural gas) every day. It looks as if the top kill procedure has worked, although we won't know for sure for a few more weeks at best.
The comparison is enlightening, but so is the media attention: there's damned little on Ixtoc-1 available on-line, but gigabytes about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What is available lets us know that the world will survive this disaster, although other experiences, such as the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf War spill of 1990 tell us that cleanup is going to be an economic disaster, and an ecological disaster, but it's not going to be the end of the world.
The Deepwater Horizon incident has lasted 38 days, and the best estimates are between 17,000 and 23,000 barrels of oil (with about 3x that volume in natural gas) every day. It looks as if the top kill procedure has worked, although we won't know for sure for a few more weeks at best.
The comparison is enlightening, but so is the media attention: there's damned little on Ixtoc-1 available on-line, but gigabytes about the Deepwater Horizon disaster. What is available lets us know that the world will survive this disaster, although other experiences, such as the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf War spill of 1990 tell us that cleanup is going to be an economic disaster, and an ecological disaster, but it's not going to be the end of the world.
